Murray Ross

On Broadway

 

There were four of us at dinner right after the show.  We agreed the new 7 p.m. Broadway curtain time was good for hungry people and old people, and we were old and hungry.  We were three old friends from college and one friend’s wife, one theatre director,two lawyers, a professor, all theatre lovers. We had a lot of catching up to do.

My friend Alan is a recently crowned "Champion of Justice" in San Francisco, but as he is wired for his anxieties, he says he’s afraid his younger colleagues are making fun of him behind his back. They call you the walrus we said. But you are very well liked.

The other male lawyer, the lion of this gang,  was on his Blackberry most of the dinner. They know him up and down New England.  The finest people.  He’s a partner in a large imploding law firm where there are more empty desks every day.  The woods are burning, boys.

His wife, a former judge, teaches law downtown and is deeply depressed about how the Court may undo  the health care law.  In her opinion the average caliber of a Supreme Court Justice these days is zero.

The New York Times reports that more than 600 people have posted their passionate responses to the new Broadway production beautifully directed by a guy older than us.  Critics from major newspapers across the country have reviewed it.  We are part of a national conversation about a play whose every moment, every phrase lodges in the memory, even and especially in old memories. Attention must be paid.

I'm telling the champion he'd have been a great Bernard, the nerdy kid who follows Biff around in high school but grows up to become a tennis playing lawyer. The champion admits he followed a mutual friend of ours around freshman year because he was a quarterback. When he introduced him to foreign films and the guy became an intellectual, Alan was disappointed-- he didn't need another egghead friend; he needed a quarterback friend. He would have carried his shoulder pads. 

"Why did we choose this show?" groans the lion, not looking up from his Blackberry.

The champion makes the case that Howard, the man who fires Willy, is a sympathetic figure. He's in a tough place, he says.  Willy is washed up and Howard wants to let him go as gently as he can. "Howard is horrible," I say, “he plays recordings of his kid reciting state capitals while his old employee is standing there at the end of his tether.”  The lion agrees with me, but the professor agrees with Alan and so does Chris Jones, the Chicago Tribune critic, who says in this production you actually prefer this very human Howard, whereas Willy comes across as "an unstable, self-delusional man whose pain emerges not as weariness and struggle but as fits of rage." That's the problem with this production, Jones says.  No, that's the problem with Willy, says the lion, "because Willy's an asshole"---in one grand sweep dismissing half a century of debate on the tragedy of the common man.  I'm finding it hard to argue with him, remembering another friend who said the same thing about Oedipus. But Oedipus at least solved the riddle of the sphinx whereas Willy never has one clue and isn’t even a guy you'd especially want to have a burger with.

Two of our party have ordered the meatloaf and the lion wants extra spinach.

The champion tells us his parents went to see the play when it opened in 1949, and every man in the audience had a hat and a brown overcoat like Willy's, and that when the lights came up after the final curtain every man in the audience was in tears.  And this in a time when men did not cry.  There weren’t many manly tears at the end of the new production, or at least I didn’t see hear or see or feel them.  Ben Brantley said the same thing in his review.  It’s a different time, suggests the professor.  She really liked Philip Seymour Hoffman’s intensity, and so did I, and so did Charles McNulty of the Los Angeles Times, while also finding his performance too monochromatic.  I agree with them both: Hoffman was so concentrated, economical and restrained that his Willy wound up too constricted.  A constricted Willy can be a problem. But so can a loose one.

Like Brantley I too almost wept for joy when the curtain rose on Joe Mielziner’s set, re-created from the original production, and when the autumn leaves came out in the flashback scene the past shimmered in a hallucinatory golden light. Ravishing, those big elms.  First thing we gotta do when we get time is clip that big branch over the house . . . We get a rope and sling her around, and then we climb up there with a couple of saws and take her down.

We all loved the scene in the restaurant, and the great scene in the kitchen where Willy doesn’t learn he is only a dime a dozen but does see his son loves him.  As  the Rocky Mountain representative and nothing if not critical I felt obliged to point out Andrew Garfield doesn’t look like he’s ever been west of 8^th avenue, and he’s too skinny to bust through a line, and he looks too young to have failed at anything.  But so what, the kid can act, we all agree.  Everyone liked Linda Edmond who handled her arias with smoke and fire, but she didn’t cry luxuriously at the end.  I explain with quiet authority that Miller says Linda cries luxuriously, and I should know.  But it turns out I am wrong, it’s Stella who cries luxuriously at the end of that other play;  Linda simply sobs more fully, released.  So I might be right in thinking Linda’s release into tears could have helped the audience with the ones that didn’t come.  But maybe this Salesman wasn’t meant for tears: it’s luminous, lucid and contained in its immaculateness.

Over dessert, there’s some talk of endings, almost inevitable these days.  The champion says he’s been wondering what he will say at the lion’s funeral.  The lion says he’s only asking Beyonce and Oprah to speak because he wants more people at his than Dave Singleman got, and that was hundreds.  Things will be sad on a lotta trains for months after that.

It’s time to go.  We pay the check; we are free and clear. We are the last ones to leave, and for a moment the empty room at Joe Allen’s looks like Frank’s Chop house two blocks away over on 6^th avenue, where Willy had his collapse.  I’m looking for him under the tables.  The lion calls our attention to the show posters on the restaurant’s wall of flops: The Moose Murders.  Dude.  Here is Where I Belong.

“Seeing the play at 71 is different from when you were 55,”  says the champion.  “Then it was about a father and a son. Now it's about the death of a salesman.”

“Where was that line about I could have been a contender,” roars the lion. “I missed that.”

 

Two Queens. One Kingdom.

This queen is in prison.  She's losing her head and fighting for her soul.

This queen is losing her mind, but keeping her throne.

Peace doesn't come easy to power in Schiller's marvellous,turbulent play.  Who can you trust? The Earl of Leicester? Maybe not.

You are always surrounded by powerful men with hidden agendas.

 

The Queen may feel a little like our Secretary of State;

Perhaps a walk in the park will give you a taste of freedom.

But before long you'll be brought to your knees.

 

And the worst is to yet to come: "Who will save me from my savior?"

Disaster strikes with blurring intensity

And leaves just as suddenly.

What do to with an order for an execution?  It looks like catastrophic regicide.

The Queen tells him: "Do Your Job."

The Lord High Treasurer wants you dead.

Journey's end is lover's meeting (as every wise man's son doth know):

But in the end, you are alone. 

With God.

With your conscience.

And with yourself.

 

Rules for Actors

In the small town of Weimar in 1798, Johann von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller formed a famous  partnership to create a new kind of theatre.  Schiller became the theatre's leading playwright, writing Mary Stuart for the state theatre there in 1800, while Goethe assumed the position of Artistic Dictator Director, taking complete charge of the actors and production. Both men wanted to create a theatre that would function as a moral institution, furthering the perfection of human culture.  Goethe developed a series of rules for actor movement, which were written down and assembled by two of his actors.  They were intended to effect a graceful series of elevated stage pictures, which the audience could contemplate at a distance from behind the proscenium arch.  Since Goethe attended to  Mary Stuart's first production I was eager to see what the Master had prescribed.  Here's an example from Goethe's long list of rules:

#35  First of all, the player must consider that he should not only imitate nature but also portray it ideally, thereby, in his presentation, uniting the true with the beautiful.

To this end we have engaged a beautiful cast, capable of acting truthfully.  You'll see.  Here's another rule:

#41. It is an important point that when two are acting together, the speaker should always move upstage, while the one who has stopped speaking should move slightly downstage.  If this advantageous shifting is carried out with skill--and through practice it can be done with great ease--then the best effect is achieved for the eye as well as for the intelligibility of the declamation. An actor who masters this will produce a very beautiful effect when acting with others who are equally trained.

In fact, though we are playing in a thrust rather than a proscenium space, there is a lot of diagonal movement in our production, and we have found that indeed this produces "a beautiful effect."

#45  To be avoided: the newfangled fashion of hiding one's hand behind the lapel of the coat.

We have corrected this new fangled fashion altogether.

#48. The two middle fingers should always stay together; the thumb, the index and little finger should be somewhat bent.  In this manner the hand is in its proper position and ready for movement.

We're still working on this one.

#67. The actor, especially the one who has to play lovers and light parts, should keep a pair of slippers on stage in which to rehearse, and he will soon notice the good results.

All our lovers wear slippers now.  The results are wonderful.

#82. The stage and the auditorium, the actors and the spectators, together represent the theatrical entity.

So it is, and especially in our wonderfully intimate space, where actors and audiences really are in the room together--and in our staging, both actors and audiences are really in the same room, the same prison.

#83.  The stage is to be regarded as a figureless tableau for which the actor supplies the figure.

We aren't working behind a picture frame, so tableaus are less frequent on our stage.  But Russell Parkman's beautiful bare floor and austere set do serve as the space for actors to supply the figures, and what figures they are too!

I'm not sure Goethe would entirely endorse our production of Mary Stuart, which offers a rougher, less idealized version of play than was staged in Weimar. But slippers and index fingers aside, it's worth noting that some of Goethe's aesthetic survives in our production, mounted two hundred years later and in another country.

 

Bones of Contention

Schiller's Mary Stuart is a storm of fierce and thrilling argument.The scenes thunder in like the surf at Torrey Pines--as one rolls by you barely have time to catch your breath before the next one crashes over you.

My analogy is intentional. The play, written in 1800, is Romantic drama at its best, and we don't get a lot of that these days, except maybe in corn syruped Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals. The Romantics, remember, were the ones who rediscovered nature, especially violent, potent nature, non-stop nature, the nature of the grand sublime--one reason why later painters flocked to paint the Rocky Mountains. And one reason why you should flock to the Dusty Loo Bon Vivant Theater.

For Schiller, it was human nature in extremis that sparked the lightning. Each scene is Mary Stuart is an argument, and each argument has right on both sides. Each side has a truth to tell, and each truth excludes the other. In this respect the play is absolutely modern. It's a Romantic version of Renaissance history that sometimes sounds like a presidential debate. The stakes could not be higher--an economic recovery now, the pending execution of a monarch then. Our production, very much influenced by the one directed by Phyllida Lloyd that we saw in London a few years ago, acknowledges the simultaneity of historical and contemporary action that is essential to the play's brilliance.

This is not ye olde Masterpiece Theatre, as fine as that often is. There are no lutes in tapestried rooms. There are no men in tights. These are the corporate corridors, now and then.

These are stone hives ruled by two elevated and bejewelled Queens who are as much imprisioned than empowered.

For a moment we invite you to forget your Fox News and your CSNBC. Come take a look at real power in action, come to where the lightning strikes and the thunder crashes. These players speak poetry and the heads of state are better dressed. Both heads rock; one will roll.

Sex and Salome

Sometimes old plays come along that seem mysteriously tuned to their moment, and so it is with our student production of Oscar Wilde's Salome,which opens this week at the Dusty Loo Bon Vivant Theatre. And how is it that this precious and sometimes tedious play, a relic of the decadent movement of a century ago, can speak to us now? It's because the play exotically mirrors the cultural chasm about sex that now seems to be ever widening in our country. Rush Limbaugh's grotesque response to Sandra Fluke is only the most recent and sensational illustration of the deep conflict between passion and puritanism that pervades our society. The whole thing is admirably spelled out in Paul Harris' essay in the London Guardian today, worth reading in its entirety:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/10/america-war-on-sex-hots-up

Harrris explains what anyone can see--America is currently in the grip of a fervant new Puritanism at exactly the moment when sex in our country has never been more promoted or widespread. The war on contraception arrives just at the time when the porn industry is worth more than $12 billion a year. In the article, Dr. Marty Klein, a sex researcher, explains that when he is asked if America is getting more progressive sexually or more conservative, he simply answers,"yes."

Such a radical conflict between freedom and restriction is at the heart of Wilde's play. Salome, as we all know, has the the hots for John the Baptist--and he wants no part of her. He is the enemy of desire, a tormented fanatic lurking like a spider imprisoned in the cistern of Babylon. Salome is desire incarnate. Her dance of the seven veils is the oldest and most celebrated strip tease in human history. But that's only the beginning, since what really turns her on is the prophet's head on a platter. The scene is an emblem of perverted lust, chronicled through the centuries. Here it is in the Renaissance:

This is a compatatively tame version--but note where the locket is lodged. Now jump to the movies--this silent film of 1927, not exactly an outake from The Artist:

And finally, from a modern production of the Strauss opera based on Wilde's play:

The image yokes together violence, death, insanity, castration and desire--it remains powerful and disturbing no matter how many times or ways in which it is re-imagined. Wilde's brocaded language swirls lust, beauty, and psuedo-biblical phrasing into one toxic cocktail. Here is Salome talking to her lover, when he is hers at last:

Ah! thou wouldst not suffer me to kiss thy mouth, Iokanaan. Well! I will kiss it now. I will bite it with my teeth as one bites a ripe fruit. Yes, I will kiss thy mouth, Iokanaan. I said it; did I not say it? I said it. Ah! I will kiss it now. . . Thou didst bear thyself toward me as to a harlot, as to a woman that is a wanton, to me, Salome, daughter of Herodias, Princess of Judaea! Well, I still live, but thou art dead, and thy head belongs to me. I can do with it what I will.

What Salome does with her head, her most stimulating new sex toy, remains in the hands of each producer. I will not spill any bloody beans, but I would strongly suggest that any members of our community who tend towards the conservative side of our sexual chasm avoid this production. Or perhaps they will be inclined to picket it. Or perhaps they will point to it as a textbook example of what happens when sexual impulses go uncurbed, just as they often do today. Herod's Babylon might well serve as a puritan's image of contemporary America, with Herod himself as its dead-souled porn addicted Tetrach.

Oscar Wilde, of course was a moral aesthete and famous provacateur, and while he knew full well that Salome was crazy and dangerous, there was a part of him that felt deeply connected to her radical excess. He was given to saying things like this:

"Do you really think ... that it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to. To stake all one's life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not -- there is no weakness in that."

Salome remains a transgressive story tricked out as a moral fable, and Wilde's version is in half in love with this transgression. To my mind Salome is not really a good play--its many repititions are inert, plastered over fin de seicle Babylon like old cake frosting. The play lacks the one quality Wilde is deservedly most famous for: wit. But others have found Salome a sensual feast, a kind of masterpiece. It certainly is one of a kind. And this decadent oddity arrives on our stage with perfect timing. What would Wilde have written if he were were writing this story now, with Sandra, Rush and Rick in mind? Let's not go there. Please. It may be enough to say that Wilde's Babylon, polarized between oppressive restriction and corrupt sexuality, looks strangely familiar, and that on both sides of the yawning divide what is missing is the essential word of Jokannon's prophet. And that word is love.

 

Moments to Remember

On the last night of The Lost Boys I sat next to a gentleman who had seen many of our shows in the distant past. He reminded me of a play we did about 30 years ago, The Nerd, and of how funny it was.  He said he and his son have never laughed so hard, and they still talk about the moment when the nerd (the hilarious Leonard Riley) emerged from the bathoom, trailing a long strip of toilet paper in his shoe.  I too can recall this moment vividly, always with a laugh, and it occurs to me that long after a show has been swept away there are still moments that remain in the heart and the mind's eye, even decades later. 

So thinking back over this last year at THEATREWORKS, what moments, what images abide from this year's season?  Here is my list, show by show.

Boeing Boeing: This was one of the most popular shows in our history, but thinking back no specific moment jumps into my mind--instead I recall lots of pleasant sensations, indeed a continuous wash of pleasant sensations without one surmounting another.  But when I close my eyes, what do I see?  All right, I confess: it's the girls. All three of them, Air Italia, Lufthanasa, and TWA.  They were sensational to look at, especially in the beautifully tailored air hostess outfits Jan Avramov put them in. No wonder that Lothario Bernard could not give any of them up. Who can blame him? No man, I say, no real man!

The Inspector General: There's a lot to remember from the stylish and energetic student production, but there is only one image that is firmly imprinted above all: the final tableau when the entire compnay froze into mannequins of astonishment after learning the real inspector has just arrived. Our production followed the famous direction of Meyerhold by sustaining this freeze for 90 seconds, a very long time in the theatre, almost as long as a sixties foreign film.  Long enough for the audience to wonder, laugh, squirm a little nervously, and feel almost as trapped as the characters themselves. Great stuff.

The Seagull:  This beautiful play is composed like a painting, full of resonant pictoral moments: Nina in the moonlight, as the earth spirit in Konstantin's play; three women on a bench on a hot summer's day; a dead seagull dropped at a girlfriend's feet.  But for me the image that stays most in the mind occurred in the last act, on the Russian estate, with the wind howling outside.  Nina has come in from the rain, and she hears the laughing voice of the lover who adandoned her in next door. And immediately she flies, she flies like a small bird, to the door, pressing herself against it to hear everything.  Jamie Ann Romero was so lovely, so delicate in her mouse gray travelling dress, and with her hands and face pressed against the door, saying nothing in the darkness with light gleaming under the door in the next room, she spoke volumes.  She was a seagull.  One of the most beautiful moments ever on our stage.

The Merchant of Venice: Another play studded with vivid verbal and visual imagery.  I'm tempted to say most memorable were the signs I posted full of biblical proscriptions against usury, since they were the source of some unusually vehement protest.  But inside the tent you can hardly forget Shylock, and especially the entire trial scene, wonderfully and forcefully acted by the whole company, led by Christopher Lowell and Jane Noseworthy.  It's one of Shakespeare's most lucid and thrilling set pieces; it makes the audience completely reverse their opinions about nearly everything. But the moment from this production I most treasure was the very last one.  The lovers are dancing to a hot Charleston in Belmont,and Launcelot Gobbo is spewing out money from a money blower all over the stage.  The tent is raining money, the joint is jumping, everyone is so happy excepting the lonely Antonio, alone on stage as someone nearly always is at the end of a Shakespeare comedy, and then Jessica sees on stage her father's yarmulke---she stops dancing, she picks it up, and looks at it.  Blackout.

Church.  There's a lot to remember about this play, but most of it was what happened afterwards--it was easily the most controversial show in our history.  And that's rather surprising when you consider it consisted mostly of four earnest if slightly odd ministers preaching the Word of God, and telling stories. And yet I venture to say that everyone who saw it will remember the final  image that the entire play was pointing towards: the arrival, one by one,  of a full gospel choir singing "Ain't Got Time to Die."  The music was powerful,and even more powerful than the music was the feeling of joy and faith written on the faces and hearts of the choir members. You just can't beat that.

Women of Will. Tina Packer is a force of nature, and when powered by Shakespeare she is titanic, as she demonstrated over and over in her one woman show dedicated to Shakespeare's women.  But the image that abides with me comes not from her potent performance, but from her workshop with our theatre students, and particularly one instance where she took in hand a young man who was rather timidly mouthing a few lines from Hamlet. In the space of five minutes she coaxed him, lead him, mauled him, and beat him--using his body like her putty to remold, like her drum to beat, and suddenly this mousy young actor was speaking Shakespeare from the center of a new being.  Astonishing.

The Lost Boys. Another show studded with images bursting from Roy Ballard's remarkable set, which in effect converted our entire stage into a vet's nursing home.  I won't soon forget the flying scene on scooters and trapezes, or Tinker Bell almost dying, or the parade of boys, pirates and redskins, or Hook swimming to his ship, or little Wendy and Peter shaking hands as they say goodbye in Neverland, or Pan flying on his wheelies, Peter standing heroically on the rock, or an old man staring into an aquarium, or the fight on the lagoon with trays and toilet plunger.  But my favorite, I confess, was the dance the lost boys did with Peter and Wendy on their last night on the island:  "Such a deliciously creepy dance it was, in which they pretended to be frightened of their own shadows."  Our wonderful old lost boys will never make it to the finals of  Dancing with the Stars, but that's just that show's loss. They put a spell on us with charm, gusto and semi-precision timing.  You had to love Melvin Grier shaking his booty (in rehearsal I asked him if could dance, and he said, "I'm black, of course I can dance!"--and he could).  You had to love Peter and Wendy's rock star entrance, he with his aviator glasses, and she flipping like a flying fish over his shoulders.  Speaking as a lost boys myself, I loved it, and was ready to jump up and join them.

 

So that's my list.  It was  kind of a tough year all round in many ways--but rich on our stage.  If you have other moments from 2011 you remember and want to share, please do!

 

Happy New Year to one and all!

 

 

 

 

Signs of the Times

People coming to our production of The Merchant of Venice at Rockledge ranch follow a lovely winding path from the parking lot to our tent. On they way they may see and read four small signs in blue letters on white boards. I had them made and I put them there. The signs were meant to be provocative, but I confess I had did not know they would be the hottest buttons pushed at Shakespeare's button pushing play, but so it has proved. At a very lively discussion with members of the Jewish community, the signs were a principal reason for a gentleman accusing me of being "morally reprehensible." This morning I have had two long phone calls from people asking me to remove them, and a message from from Rabbi Glazer telling me he has already received six very angry calls from congregants about my insensitivity.

What do these signs actually say? Each one is a Biblical injunction against moneylending. Here are the quotes:

"If you lend money to any of my people . . . you shall not be like a moneylender to him"--Exodus 22:25

"And Jesus entered the temple... and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers" Matthew 21:12

"Lends at interest and takes profit; shall he then live? He shall not live"--Ezekial 18:13"

"You shall not charge interest on loans"-- Deuteronomy 23:19

The signs are designed to introduce the audience to the world of this play, whose social and religious values are incarnated in the play's title character, Antonio, the Merchant of Venice. Antonio is not only a Christian, he is a Christian vehemently opposed to lending money at interest. You don't actually hear much of that these days, at new Life Church, First Pres, St,.Mary's or anywhere else. It seems to me that any reasonable person reading these words might be struck by how oddly they ring now. Should we really eliminate the people who charge interest, as Ezekial suggests? Are banks, credit unions, credit cards, and home mortgages evil because they charge for lending money? How many venture capitalists these days carry picket signs in front of the banks asking, rhetorically, "when did friendship take a breed of barren metal of his friend?" These are Antonio's words, the Warren Buffett of Venice, violently opposed to using money to make money. He is a character almost impossible to imagine today. In this respect Venice is not us. These Christians read and value a different Bible from the one we read now. The signs are there (as if placed by Antonio's congregation) to introduce the audience to a Biblical injunction we now largely ignore and dismiss, but which is actively present in Antonio, and which indeed is responsible for his radical anti-semitism (The Jew, as we all know, is the moneylender, and because of this--not his religious belief--Antonio finds him worthy of being kicked and spat upon).

But obviously, at least in some quarters, my design seems deeply flawed. The signs have been seen and taken as further expressions and even sanctioning of the virulent anti-semitic stereotyping still all too present today. That this involves a clear misreading (the antiquated injunctions are not simply Christian,they are Biblical--three are from the Old Testament) is perhaps irrelevant. The Merchant of Venice is rife with anti-semitic feeling, and the signs have been seen as adding insult to injury since the play already features a greedy money minded Jew, a real villain. The play is more than suspect. It understandably makes Jews very uncomfortable, and the signs have made it unbearable.

I will now risk further insult and injury by suggesting that Jews may not be this play's ideal audience. Certainly they were not when it opened at the Globe since there were no Jews, not even Sam Wanamaker, attending. The play was not written to be seen by Jews, any more than Huckleberry Finn was written to be read by black people. But this does not mean that the play promotes, foments or encourages anti-semitism. Quite the contrary. What the play does is represent a world of pervasive and casual anti-semitic expression and feeling. the word Jew ricochets through the play, its u sound echoing in "choose" and "use"--two other words sounded over and over Jews are devils, they are dogs, they are Jews. The habit of Jew mocking may easily extend itself to the audience, who may find themselves laughing along with the jokes, as many of us have at jokes made at the expense of people not of our race, gender or culture (lots of good--I mean funny-- jokes are exclusionary--made by "us" about "them"). Shakespeare begins with a stereotype familiar to his audience and he fufills their expectations of the part the stereotype was created to play. Shylock is indeed an incarnation of the greedy evil Jew. If Shakespeare stopped there, his play would indeed be morally reprehensible.

But he does not stop there. After fufilling our expectations he does what he always does, he goes beyond them. At the midpoint of the play, when everyone has become almost too comfortable with the play's anti-semitic feeling, Shylock is given the most moving and most indelible speech in protest of anti-semitic stereotyping ever spoken on the stage. The play stops. The air changes. His indictment extends beyond the play to the audience, to those of us who have been complicit with the pleasures of its cheerful dehumanizing generalities. It is a truly astonishing event, and the play doesn't stop there. Shylock's forced conversion in the trial scene again fulfills our hopes and expectations to a point that makes us uncomfortable---you want to see a villain defeated: watch this! It's what we were hoping for--but suddenly this is not what we wanted. Not at all. The villain we wanted to lose has become the victim of a brutalizing society, a society rather like our own. Jews don't need to know this. They already know it all too well. But the rest of us, well, we learn.

 

Ed and Mary

Once upon a time a young girl named from Hicksville met a boy from Hicksville she knew she was going to marry. They were both eleven years old. It would take another thousand years for him to be interested in girls; she would wait for him.

 

Many thousand years later when they were both about 15,they went to a dinner dance,and that was pretty much that.

 

 
Later, they went to college--he to West Point, she to William and Mary.  They were married on September 23, 1961.  They went off to live in Steeple Bumstead, England.

 

On weekdays, he flew over Scotland with nuclear weapons,while she tended their thatch cottage. On weekends, they went to London to see the theatre.

 

He went to the University of Michigan to get his doctorate in Engineering,so he could teach at the Air Force Academy.  But first, he had to go to Vietnam.  He received the Distinguished Flying Cross, and a zillion other medals; he flew 213 missions, many of them dangerous.

 

Meanwhile, Mary was in Ann Arbor, working as a book keeper. When Ed got home, she gave him a check for $10,000--- his entire salary for the year, which she had saved while working for the Michigan Ladder Company. 

They moved to Colorado Springs,where Ed taught at the Academy for many years before going to work with AMI industries. Mary became the first woman CPA in Colorado Springs history.  She was an unstoppable woman, he was a high flying man.  They both did very well for themselves, and then they began doing well for others. 

They decided they would cultivate excellence, and cultivate their community--our community and our university.

First they gave $25,000 to THEATREWORKS to help buy us our Shakespeare tent, which will once again be home to our summer Shakespeare production this summer--The Merchant of Venice in Rock Ledge Ranch.  Then they gave us much more.  They helped lots of others too---Pikes Peak Hospice, Goodwill Industries, The Aging Center, the Chancellor's Fund, and just recently, with pride,  Ed decided he would help UCCS Molecular Bio-Technology!

 
 

Oh, and they they decided to give UCCS the largest gift in the institution's history. Yesterday we celebrated the rededication of our new building,  named the Osborne Center for Science and Engineering.

And last night we opened our new season with a new play, The Complete Life and Love of Ed and Mary Osborne (Slightly Reduced), starring Liam and Mallory Hybl. Cute couple,don't you think?

 

We have reason to believe Mr. and Mrs. Osborne enjoyed their play.

 

 

And we believe both Eds and both Marys deserve standing ovations.  It's about the present, and it's about the future.  Let us all rise, and thank our lucky stars.

 

 

Two Bird Pictures

Here's the famous photograph of the first reading of The Seagull at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898:

 

From left to right,seated, the characters are: Polina, Dorn, Shamrayev, Trigorin (Stanislavski), Chekhov, Masha, Medvendenko, Nina, Konstantin (Meyerhold).  Standing, left to right, are Nemirovich-Danchenko (Director), Sorin, Arkadina (Knipper),and two members of ther company not in the production.

Here is our 2011 version:

 
 

From left to right,seated:  Polina (Barbara Summerville),  Dorn (Tom Paradise), Shamrayev (Bernie Klucewski), Trigorin (Matt Mueller), Chekhov stunt double, Masha (Kate Berry),  Medvendko (Dylan Mosely), Nina (Jamie Ann Romero), Konstantin (Ben Bonenfant).; standing,left to right: Sorin (Louis Schaefer), Arkadina (Jane Fromme), Cook (Craig Engle), Yakhov (Steve Wallace), Maid (carol Sinon).

The original Seagull is of the top three time theatre travel destinations of all time (the other two are Hamlet in London in 1600 and The Oresteia in Athens in 458 BCE).  The Moscow Art Theatre Production of 1898 was beyond compare.  But a very strong version of this great play, with this great cast, plays through Sunday.  You could see it a dozen times and it would still be talking to you.

Bird on the wing

The Seagull closes this week. It's the greatest play we've produced all season, one of the best plays ever written, with one of the best ensemble casts in our long history. Very fine acting! It looks good too, from beginning to end, and it sounds good. I strongly advise anyone who cares about theater to see The Seagull. If you don't think it's a great play, see it again (I'll give second comers a complimentary ticket if we have any available seats: mross@uccs.edu).  If you still don't think it's great, then we'll do lunch and I'll convince you over blini and beer.  If you are still not convinced after lunch I will offer you a puff on one of my special medicinal cigarettes.  If that fails, I will just beat you. Then I will blow my brains out since it's clear my entire life mission has been an utter failure.